He said: “We have proposed to NASA this idea of returning to the moon and we would like to set up a cargo service for that.

“We call the program Blue Moon and we have an architecture and some technologies that will allow us to soft-land large amounts of mass on the surface of the moon which could be necessary if you wanted to build a permanent settlement there.

“I think we should build a permanent human settlement on one of the poles of the moon and it’s time to go back to the moon but this time to stay.

“There you would want to preposition a whole bunch of equipment and supplies before the humans show up and some of those things might need to be assembled on the surface of the moon and that’s the kind of thing that could be done by advanced robotics with machine learning systems on board.”

First Man on the Moon in pictures

Thu, August 3, 2017

A selection of space images following Apollo 11's successful moon landing in 1969.